People let me tell you about something beautiful.
Ever since it came out in 2018 I have coveted Micah Bloom's book Codex, published by the University of North Dakota's Digital Press. Codex is a response to the 2017 flood in Minot, North Dakota and asks the question, what if you love a thing far more than anybody thought humanly possible? After the flood, Bloom and a meticulous team of researchers went to Minot and combed through the flood debris documenting and collecting books. Ordinary books. Collected and treated with the care the NTSB would give to airplane wreckage. Indeed, the whole thing has the overtones of an infinitely funded quest to discover ... what? The resulting expenditure of resources on something that we'd all walk past gives us a fascinating and beautiful look at the intersection between humanity and nature. Floods are, intrinsically, i think, about the ownership of the liminal spaces that people expand into.
Bloom took many of the collected books and exhibited them in a gallery show that I'm sorely depressed that I missed. But I'm incredibly happy to have one of the 20 art books created from the gallery show, thanks to me whining about not having one loudly on the Internet and the press realizing that there was one unsold copy lying in a drawer.
This is literally one of the two or three most beautiful books I've ever seen.
But don't be sad!!! You can get a digital version of this astounding book, for free, from the University of North Dakota Digital Press here.
I leave you with some images of this absolutely astoundingly beautiful book.
